Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to calendaring and scheduling (C&S) and more particularly to meeting scheduling in a C&S system.
Description of the Related Art
Individuals worldwide can converge over a communications network to share ideas, documents, sound and images without needing to be in the same room. Technology facilitates this through multipoint audio conferencing, video conferencing over traditional networks, and many forms of conferencing over the Internet. A substantial collection of technologies and protocols has been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video, and data over the single digital communications medium of the Internet.
An e-meeting represents one popular form of electronic collaboration. In an e-meeting, participants can view a common space, for instance a whiteboard or a shared application (or both), through which ideas can be exchanged. The viewing of the common space can be complemented with a teleconference, a videoconference, an instant messaging session, or any combination thereof, such that the meeting can act as a near substitute for an in-person meeting in a conference room.
Collaborators who participate in e-meetings often maintain a personal schedule managed by a scheduling system. Collaborators can schedule e-meetings within the personal schedule sua sponte, or the collaborators can schedule e-meetings responsive to the receipt of an invitation. An invitation typically contains data regarding the e-meeting such as a topic, list of invitees, and most importantly, a date, time and online location for the e-meeting. Using this data, the invitee can be prompted either to accept or decline the invitation. Oftentimes, the acceptance or declination of an invitation can be accomplished with a single user action such as a mouse click.
Once an e-meeting has been scheduled and the selected participants notified, prior to the scheduled occurrence of the e-meeting one or more e-meeting confirmations can be issued to the selected participants who have accepted the originally issued invitation. Traditionally, an e-meeting confirmation is an e-mail reminder provided by the e-meeting organizer and transmitted manually to the selected participants. Of course, the successful transmission of an e-meeting confirmation depends entirely upon the e-meeting organizer remembering to draft and send the e-meeting confirmation.
Once the moment has arrived for the commencement of a scheduled e-meeting, the different participants must navigate a Web browser to a specific uniform resource locator (URL) through which the e-meeting can be accessed. Additional parameters may be specified depending upon the nature of the e-meeting system, for example a first name, a last name, a phone number, a passcode and the like. Of course, each e-meeting system is different. Consequently, for the end user seeking to begin an e-meeting, the process of actually entering the virtualized e-meeting room can be manually intensive and especially frustrating when attempted through a mobile device or when attempted at a time when the end user has limited ability to interact with a keyboard and mouse.